Happiness

For some weeks after a baby is born there is an adjustment period that is strongly physical.  The baby is adjusting and closing off the gestation period for outer nature.  Most of the time is spent in sleeping, so permitting the organs of the body to adjust to an independent environment from the body of mother.  The beginning of muscle tissue is fed through wriggling, flailing of arms and legs.  Diet is highly restricted, but magnificently nutritious, best if provided from the body of the mother who so recently had provided the fuel for life within her own biological system, now continued in a transitional function.  That feeding system is preparatory also for the mother to turn back to the independent life that is to be normal for her, a normality that needs to be recovered but given another factor in its directions – the nurture of an infant that is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh.  One of the first evidences an adult looks for – that the infant is taking on proper independence and emerging as a self-conscious being is the smile, then the tiny laugh, then the whole body response in a kind of ecstasy.  There is an inward reaction in this helpless infant that registers joy.  It is a signal of normality, of health, of growth, of humanity, even of God.  God means for the human being from early beginning independence to be joyful.  What will parents and society do to aid in perpetuating that joyful response to life in an earth nature that is neutral to human responses?  The individual person will determine how to perpetuate the gift of happiness.  If also spiritual in the life of the person this characteristic becomes a lasting joy.  The secret, of course, is to manage self-cultivation, nature, and society, and perpetuate the health of the gift of joy with which the normal child carries the potential for conscious fulfillment.  The seeds of happiness (physical and psychological) with joy (spiritual and gifted) ripen to fulfillment of life, both in terms of identity with mortality and immortality.

Choices we make and attitudes we permit, when negative, can mute even suffocate happiness for us. Happiness, a joy sub-topic, can be expressed in various words like contentment (a favorite word of mine), in fulfillment (also a favorite).  It is found in achievement, love, relationship – especially in relationship with others of our kind and self with God.  There is a faith joy that overcomes fears and threats with the affirmation of life that never dies.  One of the main promises of God, for those accepting his order for life, is the promise of joyforevermore.  That promise suggests that God’s plan for life-joy is better for human beings than any alternative.  In any event the individual plays an important part in the effective working out of the roll of happiness (joy) in life.  America’s founding fathers called it the pursuit of happiness.  If the route of pursuit is for power, for wealth, for celebrity, for self alone, the outcome will not be fulfilling.

There appears in natural human life shadows of what there is in divine eternal life.  In nature we can have happiness that is expanded to everlasting joy in God’s Kingdom.  In nature we can have righteousness that is expanded to holiness in God’s Kingdom.  In nature we have faith that is expanded to reality in God’s Kingdom.  The story continues for those imaginative enough to see the clues of comparison/contrast from Scripture and experience.  When our experience matches the promises of Scripture we sense a joy no man takes from us. (John 16:21)  The Apostle John caught the sense of spiritual joy as fulfilling that jibes with the observation above about fulfillment.  (John 17:13)  He recognized that joy may be taken in degrees, and his prayer was (and is) that Christians are far enough along the route that their joy is full (real)  (John 16:24)

God’s joy is beyond laughter of a comedian’s joke, beyond the smile of a humorist’s observation of a human pleasantry, beyond the exchanges of the intimacy of genuine love, and beyond the fulfillment of a vision of creativity.  Those pleasures are so pleasant that we may miss in the comforting shadows of God’s gifts, the awareness of what we can find in the joys of the Lord.  Like Solomon we will need to find the genuine joys of our lives. (Ecclesiastes 2:10, 26, 5:20; 9:7)  Even in his gift for wisdom he missed in some points on experiments for the fullness that may be found in joy.  Happiness is triggered by something happening to us.  Joy of the Lord is something within superimposed on what is happening to us – under God.